repost, but it's been a while
"You know im something of a Libertarian myself"
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Always thought libertarians didn't watch nearly enough 90s anime. So much of it was evil corporations and Cyberpunk about evil corporations.
I too grew up in an age of movies like Star Wars fighting an overtly fascist empire, of Indiana Jones killing nazis, of countless kid's shows and cartoons emphasizing values like being accepting and not judging people by appearances, of shows like Star Trek explaining the complexity of human societies and using aliens to relay messages of understanding and empathy with others, of science and educational shows like everything on PBS.... I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.
Holy shit was I wrong. People didn't watch ANY of that shit, and if they did, they didn't think about it, and certainly didn't take any lessons from it. A vast majority of media-consumers don't engage with their entertainment I've learned, they just experience it and move on without any attempt at making mental effort. Even the lightest mental effort is too much for most people. I'm literally shocked we have the society we do knowing now exactly how ignorant most people are.
Its a bit deeper and more surreal than that. Growing up politicians had to pretend to not be villians. We voted based on the best showman. If you couldn't sell your lies, you didn't get the vote. Now it feels like people vote for who can be the most like a scooby-do villain. I don't understand how people don't find that infuriatingly insulting. These people talk to the public with blatant contept, constantly treating their constituents like they're stupid. It is so fucking blatant! Then I realize people don't know when they're being insulted. It's insane how utterly oblivious people are.
It's part of the "nothing ever happens" generation desperate to have a narrative to follow. If they're going to feel disengaged and disconnected from how complicated politics has become in an increasingly complicated world... WELL MIGHT AS WELL DUMB THIS SHIT BACK DOWN, OOHRAH WWE WRESTLEMANIA YEAH BROTHA ACTION
It's a hot take, but I sorta blame the late 90s anti-hero for this. Obvs there's other stuff going on too, but the media influence had a hand.
I'm a millennial, I grew up with Mr Rogers and Star Trek, but then came my edgy teenage years and all the girls argued about whether to fuck Spike or Angel from Buffy and all the boys wanted to be Tyler Durden. Then I graduated and I was weird for thinking Sheldon from Big Bang Theory was annoying, and characters like House and Blender were cool and lowkey enviable.
I really think a segment of my generation never stopped trying to be the lovable jerk that only exists in the movies.
As Gen X, I think I've seen all these cycles over and over again, media makes ostensible "role models" that people pattern themselves after, then the pattern changes suddenly as it does and leaves a generation stuck without direction as new role models take the stage and make all the previous adopters resentful of society.
Yeah, I feel like we can draw a direct line between Musk and the typical 90s-00s antihero. He's acting like Light Yagami from Death Note, not Picard.
I'm mostly responding to "I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.", because those lessons were seen, but then portrayed as fuddy-duddy optimism by the media of my teens. The message got switched from "lets work together to figure out the solution" to "collaboration is a waste of time because the protagonist is always correct", and I think that was combined with latchkey kids being normal, and it fucked up multiple generations.
He’s acting like Light Yagami from Death Note, not Picard.
Oh in this regard, I blame internet counter-culture not being taken seriously enough in the early 2000's, those times that we thought all these "ironic nazis" were a fad that would wash out like so many times before, this scene is where people found each other and started creating online movements out of the general, passing angst that everyone feels now and then. Depressed teens finding each other did more to kill Picard than any other media.
When Somethingawful purged their low-effort users and those users went and formed 4-chan that led directly to much of our current cultural norms, it seems to many like a footnote in internet history, but that led to the formation of several fetid fandoms and subcultures that went on to get signal-boosts from foreign powers looking for every opportunity to play both sides of our nation's potential stress-points. And they did this to great effect, this is where we saw jokes and memes turn into political movements.
I don't know if we could have done anything at the time, maybe if hosts of popular forums and boards and social media were not paid off immediately by Russian bot farms to let them rampage around, maybe if government stepped in early and nipped this interference and passed some kind of legislation against hate-speech on the internet, maybe we could have saved Picard.
Yeah, there are deffo other factors. Edgelord culture, kids raising themselves, school IT being stupider than the students, and so on. Like, my high school IT department blocked all the .com domains and only allowed .gov .edu and .org. That directly led to my entire class discovering 4chan at the same time and somebody hacked the projector to show anime tiddy during class.
But I really feel like the media influence can't be ignored. Like, a lot of antiheroes from that time period were edgelords, and I know a lot of my classmates saw them as role models.
They just blame it on the government. Wage theft? Probably due to regulations.
They saw "Look at all the cool technology capitalism is going to bring us!" instead of "Holy shit capitalism will use this amazing technology to make everything worse".
“Robot arms!”
Because they lost their limbs in an avoidable industrial mining accident because safety was too expensive.
“But look at ‘em!”
Bruh.
uh, excuse me, it's spelled "ephebophile". please be respectful, and use the right word.
Fun etymological fact: very long ago, tyranny used to refer to an autocratic leader that issued a debt jubilee, generally in response to a peasant uprising. A debt jubilee is where most or all debts are declared invalid, a clean debt slate for society, and was generally necessary to keep society functioning. The mini revolution that appointed the tyrant would be short-lived and the prior systen would more or less remain in place, just with cancelled debts.
Can you imagine the anguished cries of the parasite classes?
Truly, it would be music like no other.
Sure, it won't solve anything in the long term, but fuck me, a global debt reset would be hilarious. Landlords and banks, zeroed overnight.
Damn. There's a thought experiment.
no step on snek 😠
"If anyone says they're a libertarian, I just shrug and leave." - Atlas In His Own Words
As a former Libertarian, I approve this meme.
Same here. Ffs lol
Proud of y'all for giving it up :)
Thanks! Yea, I grew up. lol
It's ironic, because I'm sure most libertarians have convinced themselves they're being mature by working against their own interests.
Yea, I’d say that’s a near certainty.
Same, now im an Anarcho-Syndicalist :3
Libertarians are just Fascists too cowardly to call themselves that.
This is the all-time most succinct encapsulation of libertarian thought - giving the government power by voting is tyranny, but random people getting it as a side-effect of money is Freedom.
Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.
Now we're stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.
Can't have transgender teens in school, if you you don't have school! Checkmate ~~atheists~~, i mean, liberals.
/s maybe, who knows what those chuds are doing anymore
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I don't really understand what specific aspect of libertarianism this meme refers to, please explain
Not me wondering what librarians have against the government 😅
Depending on which government...your misread ain't wrong
It never makes sense why some on the right are fine with private authoritarianism
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